31 March 2015

Zed

So zed is British and zee is American, yes? Well, that might be the case today, but once
upon a time things were quite different...

Historically,
both zed and zee were used pretty much interchangeably in both British and American English, alongside a whole host of other more
outlandish names for the last (or rather,
second last) letter of the alphabet, like izzard, uzzard, zad, shard
and, our personal favourite, ezod. Of the two
we’re talking about here, however, zed it
by far the oldest, and takes its name via French and Latin from that of its
Greek equivalent, zeta. Zed first
appeared in print in the early 1400s, in a Middle English document that fairly straightforwardly
described it as “þe laste lettre of þe a b c”—which is considerably nicer than what
William Shakespeare had to say about it.

Zee, on
the other hand, first appeared in print in a British language textbook—Thomas Lye’sNew Spelling-book—in 1677. The name zee itself is
thought to have originated as nothing more than a dialect variation of zed,probably influenced by the regular bee,
cee, dee, ee pattern of much
of the rest of the alphabet. But precisely how or why it became the predominant
form in American English is unclear.

Thanks to his new calling card, everyone knew where Zubin Mehta had been

One
widely-held theory is that because zed,
as the older of the two, was the most widespread variation amongst British
English speakers, during the Revolutionary War American English speakers looking to distance themselves from anything even vaguely British simply adopted the zee
version as their own to make a stand—no matter how small it
might seem—against British control. Alternatively, there mightn’t have been any
political reasoning behind it at all, and the name might simply have come to the forefront
as American English was forced to adapt and simplify as more and more colonists—coming
from ever more distant countries, and speaking an ever more varied array of
languages—began arriving in the New World.

Whatever
the motivation might have been, by the mid-nineteenth century zee had become the standard form of the
letter Z in the United States, and has remained so ever since.